For over two decades Dylan Carlson has dredged the bowels of existence under the weighty moniker, Earth. The process, as you can imagine, is arduous, immersive, and dark as hell. But so it is with each new Earth release that drone-metal fans in basements everywhere wait with bated breath for the opportunity to sit in solitude, melting away under the musical equivalent to morphine.
Well, the time has come once again to rejoice, for the almighty Earth has returned with another dose of their sedative sludge-metal. Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, their newest record, finds Earth following up their smoldering opus, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull. That record, rightfully considered by many a masterpiece of the form, presented an Earth in their newest manifestation, one steeped in the blood-tinged spirit of the south, evoking Americana-twang alongside the post-apocalyptic. Similarly, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 could also stand-in as a soundtrack to a Cormac McCarthy novel, but one where the already minimalistic plot gets less interesting as its lone protagonist trudges across the barren but all-too-familiar landscape.
Let us not be mistaken, this is drone: repetition is welcome. But when the seeds of repetition themselves are slightly rehashed forms of what came before, there is not as much to be sown. It is with a heavy heart that I inform listeners that Angels of Darkness is not the majestic follow-up they may have hoped for. However, any Earth is better than none. While much of the territory here has already been trod, Angels of Darkness certainly has its subtle merits, its moments of hushed beauty, but it fails to reap the bountiful harvest of The Bees Made Honey.
Album opener, ""Old Black,"" is Angels' most poignant offering. It begins slowly, with Carlson delivering a slow, delicate and cascading riff that searches for a distant light, only to cower back into the darkness in the form of a beautiful treble. Adding to the subtle drama is a background of cello, the most notable change in the Earth ensemble, hovering in the background like rustling chandeliers.
But for whatever reason, the rest of the album never captures the brooding perfection of ""Old Black."" The drone and melodies are still there, fully intact, but the churning charms of the guitar are never as shimmering or as memorable as they are in the album's beginning ode. It is, sadly, an exercise of diminishing returns. ""Father Midnight"" puts forth a two-note shimmer that angles upwards, but never finds that necessary pivot to keep the listener engaged. ""Descent to the Zenith,"" aside from sounding like an extra track from The Bees Made Honey sessions, feels overly buoyant, its lightness winding above the surface without delivering any real pull one way or the other. The title track and closer, a twenty minute farewell address, provides case-in-point for the album's major shortcoming. Whereas the Bees Made Honey sacrificed some of the rudiments of a minimalist approach for the sake of a memorable melody, Angels of Darkness seems content shuffling its feet, wandering freely. Throughout the album Earth still builds the familiar tensions, but that is just the problem—we've already been there.
